


Slow

by Kantayra



Series: The Masters and Doctors in the Matrix [8]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Banter, Bickering, Bondage, Chases, Flirting, Insecurity, M/M, The Master Has Issues, The Master's Drums (Doctor Who)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:54:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27043063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kantayra/pseuds/Kantayra
Summary: The Master leads the Tenth Doctor on a frenetic chase across the universe. As if either of them could ever escape each other...
Relationships: Tenth Doctor/The Master (Simm), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Series: The Masters and Doctors in the Matrix [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592659
Comments: 4
Kudos: 39





	Slow

**Author's Note:**

> Help, I can't stop writing 10/Simm! I was meant to be writing another fic entirely, but then I made the mistake of rewatching 'The Sound of Drums', and I fell in love with the crazy energy of the 10/Simm dynamic all over again. I'm bumping this fic up earlier in the series to where it goes, character-arc-wise. (And I'd been doing such a good job not having to reorder the stories, too! :P)

“Catch me if you can!” The Master laughed, spun behind the console just as the Doctor lunged for him, and was out the door before the Doctor had time to correct his overstep.

Scrambling back in the other direction, the Doctor threw open the door to a scene of absolute chaos. Vendors, brandishing multi-coloured fruits, harangued. A swirl of be-feathered dancers jangled by with bells on their crowns. Hooligans jeered, and shoppers bustled.

The Doctor dashed out into the crowded marketplace. He closed his eyes, opened his other senses, and breathed deep…

_There!_

A scream and a crash and a wicked laugh, and the Doctor was off.

He ran past the dizzying throngs, jostling innocents and merchants and outright criminals as he went. Rounding a corner sharply to cut into a blind alley, he nearly toppled a tentacled Nonapodian woman, causing the basket atop her cilia to teeter sideways and spill the seedpods inside upon the ground.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” the Doctor shouted back to her scowl as she telekinetically raised the fallen contents back into her basket.

But then he was around the next bend, into the subterranean bowels beneath the thriving city above. Here the air was cool and dank and acrid. The atmosphere stuck to his pores, the light dimmed, the colours faded, the clatter muted.

People walked the undercity, too. But these people had hunched shoulders, worn garments, and suspicious faces: the poverty that built the foundation for the prosperity above.

The Doctor spun to avoid colliding with one cloaked figure and ducked just out of range of the fanged defensive snap of the man’s mandibles. A gang of drunkards spilled out into the street, and the Doctor weaved awkwardly between them, only breaking stride for a moment. He got a proposition called to him from one direction, and a job offer in the same profession from the rival brothel across the street.

He ignored both, sinking deeper into the darkness as he ran until finally—

“Well, you took your sweet time. Age finally getting the better of you?” The Master lounged ominously against a rusted-out warehouse door, one temple pressed to the jamb, his hands buried deep in his coat pockets, his lips forming a tight line that might have curved just slightly up or down at the very edges – it was hard to tell.

“What have you done?” The Doctor clattered to a sudden stop in front of the Master, just out of easy striking range. His chest heaved as his bypass caught his breaths back up, and he eyed the Master up and down ravenously, looking for any clue as to what his maniac shadow was up to _this_ time.

The Master grinned, wide and brittle and not at all reassuring, and then his eyes darted into the warehouse behind him. “Lovely planet, isn’t it? Brilliant spice-teas, although I prefer the espressos. If you’re still feeling worn out, old man, why not try a quintuple? Thriving black market, too, although of course you always ignore the really _interesting_ places. Did you know that five anti-tachyon bombs actually survived the Time War? It was news to me, too. Think if I set them all off simultaneously, I can erase this entire galaxy from the time-stream? Yeah, I don’t know, either! Won’t it be fun to find out and see? Here we go!” The entire speech passed in a blur without so much as a breath or a break between syllables. At the last, the Master pulled out a trigger mechanism from the depths of one of his coat pockets – must’ve been bigger on the inside – and flicked the red switch at the top with a distinctive, satisfying click of finality.

“What? Wait!” The Doctor said, his mind catching up to the Master’s words and his eyes widening in alarm.

The Master gave him a jaunty wave. “Do _try_ to keep up,” he said, and tossed the Doctor the detonator. “Buh-bye!” And he ran off in the opposite direction, taking the first five paces backwards so that he could blow the Doctor a cheeky farewell kiss.

The Doctor goggled at the beeping device counting down in his hands. He ignored the warm flush in his cheeks, and instead pulled out his sonic screwdriver, only to discover that of course the detonator was deadlocked.

The beeping tracked back into the warehouse, where the Doctor did indeed find five anti-tachyon bombs intact from the Master’s little back-alley arms deal, the Gallifreyan writing on the casings still fresh and new.

That, at least, was something of a blessing. The Time Lords, in their infinite bureaucracy, had labelled everything neatly. The Doctor’s screwdriver was able to open the panel labelled ‘Core Access’, and he found a web of psionic spiral circuitry within that gave him terrible flashbacks to their Academy engineering practicals.

There was a mnemonic for this, he was reasonably sure: “Omega’s Mother Hates Cooking Hard-Boiled Eggs” – or was that for unspooling black-hole fixtures? In any case, the Doctor tried it and hoped that the first H was the ‘Helium’ and not the second H, or else the entire system would become a smear of potential time.

Miraculously, it seemed he’d remembered something right.

The first bomb stopped ticking, and he dashed off to the second, third…

The fourth detonated in his face, right as he’d been cold-fusing the high-circuit. The fifth went too, of course, and they wiped the whole planet from existence, along with a decent chunk of the solar system.

The Doctor blinked and coughed and floated aimlessly through non-space-time. A little ways away hovered his TARDIS, twirling slowly anti-clockwise (or, at least, in the opposite direction from which the Doctor was rotating: who knew what ‘anti-clockwise’ even meant when there was neither space nor time).

The Doctor sighed and slowly did the breast-stroke through non-existence in the direction of his TARDIS. It shouldn’t have worked, of course, but there were no laws of physics anymore, so the Doctor felt justified in just making it up as he went.

He chased the door frantically for a solid minute, since it was rotating away _just_ too fast for him to reach, but he couldn’t figure out how to slow himself down and wait for it to rotate back around to him, either.

Finally, his random, undignified flailing succeeded, and he caught the handle and tumbled inside with a gasp at the sudden presence of space-time and – more importantly – oxygen once again.

The Master sat atop the console, dangling his legs insouciantly and flipping through the pages of one of the Doctor’s old one-hearted attempts at keeping a diary, snickering on occasion at what he read therein.

The Doctor licked his lips and crawled his way back up to his feet and over to the console. The Master ignored him the entire while, pretending to be rapt at the Doctor’s tortured attempts at prose, but the sneaky little smile at the corner of his lips was a dead give-away.

The Doctor planted his hands on the console on either side of the Master’s slippery hips, panted twice against the stubble of the Master’s cheek for emphasis, and then kissed that tricky corner of the Master’s mouth where his smile had just widened at the Doctor’s theatrics.

“Oh, did you finally catch up?” the Master asked in wide-eyed faux-surprise. He dropped the Doctor’s diary, grabbed the lapels of the Doctor’s coat with both hands, and forced the Doctor back down onto the console beneath him and his tongue obscenely far down the Doctor’s throat.

A flurry of activity occurred, and the Doctor couldn’t really process how he’d got his face pressed into the time-dilator, his trousers and pants twisted around his knees, and the Master’s cock buried balls-deep in his arse, ploughing him out long and hard. It didn’t really matter much, either, as long as it was happening and the Master was so perfectly deep inside him, reaming out the core of him until he felt it all the way into his bones.

The Master came sharply, victoriously, with a final satisfied twist of his hips that caused the Doctor to lurch up against the controls.

The Doctor came as well, with an embarrassing little whimper, at the feel of the Master sliding out of him inch by inch, the slickness of the Master’s pleasure now filling his insides.

For one glorious moment, the Master leaned full over the Doctor’s back, so that their bodies were pressed together from head to toe, touching everywhere. The Master breathed heavily into the Doctor’s ear, and whispered harshly, “Good. Boy.” He gave the Doctor’s bare arse a congratulatory slap in punctuation, and then suddenly was gone.

The Doctor slid slowly to the floor with an even more embarrassing little whimper, and gingerly pulled up his pants and then his trousers. He was sticky and achy inside, but he was also reluctant to erase the evidence of the Master’s coming.

When he finally looked up, the TARDIS door was ajar again. The Doctor could hear machine noises from outside. He took a fortifying breath, rose to initially shaky feet, and ran again.

This time they were on an asteroid mining station. Automated drones processed ore from deep within the planet, while the odd repair robot wheeled by making efficiency adjustments, and higher-level humanoid automatons monitored the overall progress from the command centre.

“Another biological entity, same species as myself,” he asked the first Type S-24 – capable of speech and intelligent interaction – that he spotted, “gorgeous golden eyes, has anyone seen him?”

The Type S-24 whirred for a millisecond as it accessed the full surveillance audit history. “Biological entity, located in Sector 349A Subsection 12: Laser Targeting System And—”

The Doctor didn’t really need to stay to hear how much worse it could get. “Thanks, much obliged!” he shouted back over his shoulder and ran down the corridor that pointed toward Sector 351: only two sectors away, the Master must’ve been going easy on him.

Of course, he had that thought before he remembered that each sector had as many as 12 subsectors, and seeing as everything was mechanised, sectors could be as large as they pleased and no one was there to object.

The Doctor, however, objected stringently, and he must’ve run at least a solid mile before he came to a screeching halt at the control module where the Master was humming something unnaturally cheerful to himself under his breath as he redirected all the drill lasers to point directly at—

“Is that the sun?” the Doctor blurted out and dove for the controls.

The Master blinked up at the guidance board overhead. “If it’s not, it’s one hell of a lightbulb,” he said sarcastically. He caught the Doctor’s hands, stopping him.

The two of them interlocked, struggling against each other to reach the controls, hands grasping, chests grinding together, bodies turning again and again as they forced each other back.

“I could have da-a-a-a-a-anced all night!” the Master began belting out in a lovely rich baritone, as they twirled together in the tight space, the Doctor trying to deactivate the laser countdown and the Master trying to stop him. It had to be one of the oddest parodies of a dance the Doctor had ever participated in; _proper_ partners spent a lot less time deliberately trying to trip each other, he was reasonably certain.

The Doctor finally twisted back the other way, ducked, and left the outraged Master holding his empty coat. He slammed his fist down onto the abort button, and the white-hot tip of the laser dimmed down to red then orange as it shut off.

“Oh, you’re no fun at all!” the Master complained, dug around in the Doctor’s coat pocket, and pulled out the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. He dangled it once in front of the Doctor’s face—“You should know better than to leave your toys lying about”—and then aimed it directly at the feedback circuits.

“No, don’t!” the Doctor shouted.

“Too slow, again!” the Master crowed, and fused the cooldown mechanisms.

The system began to overload.

“You madman!” The Doctor clutched at his hair. “This entire asteroid is going to blow sky-high!”

“Oopsie.” The Master grinned unapologetically. “Better run, then.” And dashed out again.

The Doctor limped out after him, then caught his stride again and ran all the way back to his TARDIS. When he arrived, the station was going into full meltdown, and the robots were racing frantically – futily – to stop it.

The doors to the TARDIS were, of course, shut and locked.

The Doctor banged on them with his fists. “Let me in!” he demanded.

“Let me think about that _real_ hard,” the Master’s voice wafted out from inside. “Hmm… No.”

“Oh, come on, _please_?” the Doctor wheedled. “You’ve already blown me up once today. It must be getting repetitive by now.”

“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” the Master said. “But somehow it never grows old.”

The Doctor sighed and leaned his forehead against the barred TARDIS door. “I’ll do something nice for you,” he promised. Teased, really.

A pause. “Oh?” came back warily through the door. “What is that?”

The Doctor considered. “I’ll suck you off.”

“Pfft!” The Doctor could practically hear the Master’s eye-roll. “You’ll do that anyway. Practically beg me to let you.”

“Fair enough,” the Doctor conceded. “How about… I’ll let you tie me up. That thing you did that one time with all those ropes and knots.”

“You got out of ‘all those ropes and knots’ in approximately three seconds,” the Master retorted, voice flat, sounding both unimpressed and judgmental at the memory. “Artistry is wasted on you, philistine!”

“Only because you wouldn’t scratch the itch on my nose!” the Doctor insisted. Behind him, the countdown chirpily announced that he had three whole minutes before he got blown up for the second time that day. It was time to bring out the big guns: appeal to the Master’s nostalgia, his sense of romance. “What if,” the Doctor said, dropping his voice low, “I agree to wear the straight-jacket and the ball gag?”

A definite telepathic quiver could be felt through the door, a frisson of excitement in the Master’s impressive psychic aura. “Will you let me strap you to the gurney?” the Master asked hopefully.

“As tight as you want me,” the Doctor promised, and held his breath.

There was about half a minute of silence while the Doctor counted down in his head in time with the robotic countdown out loud, eyes squeezed shut tight and fingers and toes all crossed, and then the TARDIS door opened before him, and he tumbled inside.

The Master, still looking suspicious, held up the red ball gag in one hand. “Open wide.”

The Doctor opened his mouth and let the Master pop the gag in his mouth and shut the TARDIS door behind them. The gag was as annoying and uncomfortable as he remembered, but he went without fuss as the Master twisted his arms behind his back, bound him up in full Hannibal Lector regalia, and then sat back to admire his work.

The Doctor could just barely see him out of the corner of one eye if he rolled his eye down as far as it could go. The Master was uncharacteristically entirely still, eyes transfixed upon the Doctor, licking his lips occasionally as he studied him. It was such a contrast from the usual manic running the Master had him doing all across the cosmos that the Doctor took a moment to consider what it meant.

The next second, the moment was lost to him, because suddenly the Master was upon him, his hand gripping tight around the Doctor’s throat and his thumb pressing painfully into the Doctor’s Adam’s apple.

“You’d like to think you’re better than me,” the Master said slowly, almost hypnotically, his eyes narrowed to slits, “that you’re better than _this_.” The hand not play-choking the Doctor came to settle over the rather shameless bulge at the front of the Doctor’s trousers where the Master now straddled him on the gurney. “You’re not, though, are you?” the Master continued coldly. “You can save a hundred-million planets and defeat a hundred-million plans, but in the end what you really want”—he leaned in close to whisper directly into the shell of the Doctor’s ear—“is to be put in your proper place.”

A shiver ran down the Doctor’s spine, and he squirmed within his straight-jacket. Mercifully, the Master’s hand loosely cupping his cock tightened, squeezing him with delicious friction.

“Oh, you _do_ like that, don’t you?” the Master practically purred. “How does it feel, I wonder? To be absolutely helpless? To be so desperate for another’s touch that you’ll beg, plead, debase and demean yourself, rot out the very core of who you are…” The Master dragged his cheek slowly against the Doctor’s as he spoke, scraping both their faces raw on each other’s stubble. “All for one kiss.” With cruel inevitability, he leaned in and pressed a peck that was almost sweet in its sincerely against the ball gag that still held the Doctor’s mouth prisoner.

And, oh, did the Doctor feel like a prisoner more than ever right then. He wanted that kiss, of course, that rare taste of tenderness from the Master’s lips, but even more he wanted to shout and scream and beg at the Master. Because it was very clear that the Master wasn’t berating the Doctor with that speech. No, that particular sneer of loathing only came out when the Master skirted around his own faults and weaknesses. The absolute need to tell the Master that the love he felt for the Doctor – twisted and warped as it was – wasn’t a fault or weakness, was nearly unbearable.

“Do you enjoy the chase?” The Master’s hand moved deliberately on the Doctor’s erection now. It sneaked its way into his pants and held him firmly for one moment before stroking the Doctor’s cock in time with the Master’s accusations. “It’s exhilarating, isn’t it? The hope. That maybe this time you’ll finally catch what you need.”

His thumb swirled around the head of the Doctor’s cock, almost lovingly, but the ball gag cancelled out the Doctor’s responding moan.

“It burns, that _need_. An aching emptiness”—the Master hand stroked down sharply, encircling the Doctor in tight heat all the way to the root—“and you can’t help but wonder: will anything ever truly satisfy you? Can anything be _enough_?”

He jerked his hand back up, and the Doctor’s tongue pressed hard against the gag, desperate to cry out.

“Do you feel it?” the Master asked, and his voice had gone hoarse and ragged now, as if he were the one being teased on the knifepoint of orgasm and not the Doctor. His hand pulsed and tightened around the Doctor in a regular rhythm – _da-da-da-dum_ – before going lax again. His other hand, still loose about the Doctor’s throat, trailed down to the Doctor’s pulses point and tapped it to the same drumbeat. “The drums went away, you know, after you saved Gallifrey, and those bastards had no further need of me.”

His teeth were sharp and his eyes furious, but not directed towards the Doctor now. No matter how strained their relationship had become over the eons, the Doctor had never seen ice-cold disdain like that from the Master. Their animosity had always been warm and rich and affectionate: a sort of playful seething, passionate fury, a familiar kind-and-loving hatred. The Doctor couldn’t bear to see the Master like this, hurt by another’s hands, the razor-sharp focus of his obsession directed at someone other than the Doctor, if only for a moment.

Then the Master’s eyes snapped back down to the Doctor, his once more, and the Master smiled almost kindly. “This beat”—he tapped the rhythm at the Doctor’s throat, the double-thrum of the Doctor’s hearts—“is much more insidious. It never goes away, never leaves me, not even—” He broke off abruptly and looked away again, blinking back the sudden wetness at the corners of his eyes.

With a vicious twist of his fist, he brought the Doctor off almost painfully.

Stars that might have been pain or might have been pleasure flashed at the edges of the Doctor’s vision, and he bucked as best he could while still strapped down to the gurney, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to touch the Master, to hold him, to set right all the twisted misinterpretations in the Master’s mind, turn the Master’s obsession to sweet consummation.

When the Doctor opened his eyes again, he found the Master looking down at him with an expression somewhere between fondness and sadness. “That beat never leaves me,” the Master repeated in a whisper, “not even when you do. But you don’t understand that, do you? You’ve never heard mine.” He removed his hands from the Doctor and sat back, his fingers resting on his own throat this time, finding his pulses. His eyes squeezed shut tight, a furrow forming in his brow, as he listened to his own internal biorhythms.

The Doctor felt his chest ache. He struggled to free his hands, but the arms of the straight-jacket were tied securely. He needed to do something, anything. All this pointless running and chasing, and nothing ever being truly being resolved between them. He just needed…

He just _needed_.

His struggles ceased so abruptly that the Master opened his eyes slowly, suspicious slits, to study the Doctor beneath him. The Doctor let his arms go limp behind him, so that the buckle on the straight-jacket clanged against one of the legs of the gurney.

And then, as if in a trance, he _did_ hear it. It wasn’t the beating of his own hearts – too off-kilter for that – and it wasn’t exactly in counterpoint, either. It was other, external, but it also melded so well with the thrum of his own blood beating through his veins. _Da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum._ His own personal drums. Could that sound drive him mad too?

He squirmed once beneath the Master, who still looked down at the Doctor as if he didn’t quite know what trick the Doctor planned to pull this time. The movement had its intended results: the buckle swung into motion, and clanged against the gurney leg again. The Doctor could move his arm just enough to control it, to time it, to…

_Clang. Clang._

The Master frowned.

_Ca-clang. Ca-clang._

The Doctor twisted his arm _just_ right.

_Ca-ca-ca-clang._

They both froze for a moment, the Master looking perplexed and the Doctor trying to speak muffled words through the ball gag.

So he did it again: _Ca-ca-ca-clang, ca-ca-ca-clang._

The Master’s fingers had never left his own pulses. His eyes widened, and until that moment the Doctor hadn’t been really sure whether what he’d been hearing was an illusion brought on by his own muted reflection of obsession, or whether it had been truly the Master’s heartsbeats thrumming frantically inside his head.

The Master’s sudden fear and uncertainty gave the Doctor confidence. He clanged the double-beat against the gurney leg again and again and again.

The tempo sped up as the Master stared down at him in disbelief. “How are you doing that? What did you do?” He let out a sudden sharp laugh of realisation and scrambled back off the Doctor. “Oh, you clever cogs: you could feel it through my femoral artery.”

His pulse calmed with this logical explanation. Half a span between them now, with no points of contact, the Doctor slowed his clanging – _ca-ca-ca-clang_ – in perfect time with the slowing and then rapid resurgence of the Master’s heartsbeats.

“You…” the Master trailed off, a look between hopeful and horrified in his eyes, and then in a flash he’d run off again.

The Doctor banged his head twice back against the gurney, and then began the long and painstaking process of working his way free of the straight-jacket. Good job his was double-jointed. Well, maybe triple-jointed. Well, maybe he just kept a pair of scissors hidden in the hem of his jacket sleeve for such an emergency.

The point was, he got free in a short enough period of time that the Master would no doubt insult his lack of respect for the fine art of bondage once again. He opened the TARDIS doors a third time, and stared off into an infinite sea of red grass.

This was Gallifrey, surely.

Silver-leaved trees quavered in the distance, and the wind swayed the grasses in the rustling susurration of his childhood. The Master must’ve been truly reaching the end of his tether to have fled here, either that or the Doctor was. Maybe both. Maybe it was the same thing.

There was no sign to indicate which way the Master might have gone. The reeds were tall enough this late in the summer that, even if the Master were close, the Doctor wouldn’t be able to see him.

Slowly, deliberately, the Doctor took a step in one direction. Paused, stopped. The drums in his head sounded softer that way. Instead he circled round to the back of the TARDIS and sat down with his back against it, his hip nestled right up next to the Master’s, where the Master hadn’t run or hid at all for once. Instead the Master just sat there, curled up into himself with shoulders hunched and arms wrapped around his shins, his face buried between his knees.

The Doctor leaned against him, wedged halfway between the TARDIS and the Master’s back, and rested his cheek on the Master’s shoulder.

The Master tensed for a moment, but then slowly relaxed. The two of them just breathed together for a nice long while, while the Doctor watched the grasses wave in the wind and the Master worked through whatever bizarre coping mechanisms he’d developed over his lifetimes that allowed him to somehow function. It was a process even the Doctor only partially understood, and he didn’t like to interrupt.

Finally, however, the Master looked up as well, staring off into space in roughly the same direction the Doctor was. The Doctor took that as his cue.

“Hi,” he said, and nuzzled the Master’s neck from behind as he gave the Master’s waist an affectionate squeeze.

The Master snorted. “You’re absolutely absurd, you know.” He sniffed once and leaned back into the Doctor. “Don’t know why I ever developed a thing for you.”

“You’re absolutely absurd, too,” the Doctor agreed. “That’s exactly why I developed a thing for you.”

The Master’s lips twitched slightly. “Did you, now? You have terrible taste.”

“I have brilliant taste,” the Doctor insisted, and pulled the Master closer. There was one moment of resistance, and then the Master fell into his arms and let himself be held. “There, now,” the Doctor said hoarsely. “That’s nice, isn’t it?”

The Master snorted and pressed his ear against the Doctor’s right heart. “You sound like you’re about to have a coronary.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve always had a problem taking things slow.”

“No, really?”

The Doctor gulped. “Slow can be nice sometimes, though.” His fingers trailed up the Master’s arm, taking a moment to savour the solidity of the body held in his arms. “Nothing wrong with slow.”

“Doctor,” the Master said with what one might almost have mistaken as a besotted chuckle, if one were foolish enough to have such a thought while the Master was within disembowelling distance, “for you, ‘slow’ is a million lightyears a second, on a good day. ‘Slow’ would have been left alone behind on Gallifrey millennia ago.”

“That depends,” the Doctor insisted. “I may be coming around to ‘slow’ in my dotage.” He took a calculated risk and slid down the side of the TARDIS, pulling the Master along with him, so that they lay together flat on their backs in the grass, looking up at the sky the same way they had as children so long ago. The Master – perhaps unsurprisingly – went with him, the way he always had done. “What would you think of, just on occasion, taking things slower?”

“Oh Doctor, only you would make me such an offer once I’m finally fast enough to get ahead.” The Master didn’t sound offended, though, and he seemed perfectly content to lie like this with his head resting over one of the Doctor’s hearts.

“Yeah, well, I like to be contrary.” A pause, and then a consolation. “Gotta keep up with you, after all.”

“As if”—the Master surged up over him, in a long, languid, catlike motion so that their mouths just barely brushed—“you ever could.”

The Doctor grinned up at him, delighted. “Such a perfect, obstinate mess, you are.”

The Master growled, cupped the Doctor’s chin in one hand, and kissed him, long and slow and deliberate. For once, it wasn’t a kiss meant to go anywhere. They didn’t fuck frantically. They didn’t jostle each other for control. They didn’t fight and kick and bite. No lives were saved nor lost.

Instead, they just lay there in the wind-swept grass, in each other’s arms, kissing as if they had all the time in the world, the way they had when they were young and the universe was fresh and new, and they had everything to live for.

It turned out, in the end, that going slow was the absolute best, just as long as it was with someone fast enough.


End file.
